Dear Judy,

I don't know if this is up your alley. One of the people in my church died recently. He was wealthy and had the best doctors but prostate cancer got him anyway in the end. He was also married, with four children, and slept with a number of women, including the church secretary. She has a broken heart, still, because he left her.

I think maybe he got prostate cancer because he was an adulterer, although I realize there's no scientific proof of this.

Now some of the people in our church want to establish a scholarship in this man's name (a religious scholarship! for college students who want to go on and become pastors). So what do I do?

Do I inform our own pastor about this issue? In a way I don't want to because the two men were friends. But in a way I feel I should do what's right, no matter what. Also, I think the 11 members of our church who want to fund such a scholarship should be told so maybe the scholarship can be given another name. And maybe the man's widow, who is a very nice woman, but none too smart.

Your view?

Celia

Dorothy Parker: If every man who cheated got smote, well, there'd be no one left to smite.

Casanova: Yes. I'm sure the pastor had...no idea. He'll be shocked. Really.

Anais Nin: I don't believe in "morality."

Brigham Young: I really fail to see what the problem here is, Madam.

Peggy Hopkins Joyce: Wait, how wealthy?

Saint Augustine: Passion is the evil in adultery. If a man has no opportunity of living with another man's wife, but if it is obvious for some reason that he would like to do so, and would do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he was caught in the act.

Leopold and Loeb: We know what it's like having to deal with intellectual inferiors; torture.

Andrew Carnegie: You're absolutely right; all philanthropists should lead blameless personal lives.

Oscar Wilde: Madam, I find your moralizing exceedingly tedious.

Hippocrates: A doctor, you're not.

Benjamin Franklin: Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Jack Kerouac: Fuck religion.

The Man Who Broke My Heart, A Church Scandal and a Callous Cousin [Obit]

Earlier:"My Marriage Is Falling Apart Because I'm A Mac, And He's A PC."
"How Do I Explain To My Friend That Her Bad Mothering Drove Her Daughter To Suicide?"
What To Do When You're In Love With Your Sister's Widower?

"How Do I Keep My Sullen Daughter From Alienating My Wealthy Boyfriend?"

The woman is Belle de Jour, author of Playing the Game, and her suggestions pretty much read like pointers for good writing in general. She says,

Arms are flying, tongues are flicking, and where on earth did that extra arm come from? The effectiveness of sex writing depends, as with real sex, on getting from point A to point Z via all the letters in between. Too many stories start on the sofa, then segue straight into a threesome on the beach.

Plenty of non-erotic books fail because the author can't keep track of the rooms in a house or the stops on a bus route, or because the action moves implausibly quickly or slowly. Getting from A to Z effectively: good advice for any writer. So is de Jour's caution not "to dwell on what ruffly garment was worn, the precise glossy shade of a woman's hair, and so on," or to "describe anything that is not in fact chocolate as being 'like chocolate.'" Perhaps her only totally sex-specific tip is this one:

If I wanted to read about the kind of sex I have every day, I would . . . well, I wouldn't. Why fantasise about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable . . . and, therefore, the inherently desirable.

The male sex-tipster, Ewan Morrison, starts off by explaining why women don't write about sex as well as men do (heard this before?). He says, "it's because male writers have a much longer tradition of breaking taboos about sex (straight and gay)." His examples are Henry Miller and Anais Nin. He writes,

Miller is all vigour, urgency and detail. Nin's body becomes relatively anonymous for him. Nin has to make the act seem poetic and address the virility of Miller's 'authorship.' 'His book swells inside of me,' she writes. His penis is, almost literally, the canon of Western male fiction.

Comparing a dick to a book (kinda oblong) doesn't sound all that hot, but is anonymity really the recipe for great erotica? Morrison seems to think so. He writes that,

the bourgeois distinction between erotica and porn [...] is based on an opposition between ethically good sex with 'wholesome, well-rounded characters' (erotica) and nasty cheap sex with anonymous bodies (porn). Porn is omnipresent now and calling a certain kind of porn 'erotica' is a middle-class attempt to set itself against the tasteless culture of the masses.

It's clear here that we're supposed to think sex with "wholesome, well-rounded characters" is less fun than "sex with anonymous bodies." And it sure is, if you make those characters sound like big balls of oatmeal. If, however, a character has an interesting personality or an exciting (or twisted) relationship to the person he's fucking, isn't that more arousing than anonymous tab-a-into-slot-b? Maybe not for Morrison, who seems to take a pretty narrow view of what's acceptable in erotica. He says,

Write from experience, not fantasy[.] Fantastical sex scenes are hilarious, shallow and awful. Follow the masters: Miller, Jean Genet and Nin, who wrote from the depths of lives devoted to sensual pleasure. If you don't have the experiences to enrich your writing, go out and get them or stop trying to write sex scenes.

Pretty much the polar opposite of Belle de Jour's advice, and kind of odd coming from someone who wrote Ménage, a novel inspired by the ménage à trois between Henry Miller, June Miller and Anaïs Nin. Presumably Morrison never actually had sex with any of these people, and thus his writing didn't really come from experience. Perhaps he discovered that imagining sex you could never or would never have is actually titillating? But then again, that's probably just my failure to break taboos talking. Better go back to fucking books.

How To Write Sex: A Woman's Tips [TimesOnline]
How To Write Sex: A Man's Tips [TimesOnline]

Earlier: "Women Can't Write About Sex," Says Female Sex Writer

Here's what "Randi" wrote into Obit Mag's mortality-related advice column.

Dear Judy,

I can hardly stand to write this, I'm so embarrassed. My older sister died a year ago, more or less. It wasn't a big surprise. She had uncontrollable diabetes. Also, she was very overweight and weak, never exercised and didn't take care of herself the way she should have.

My problem is her husband. I've been crazy about him for a few years now. Obviously, while my sister was alive I never told him, my brother or anyone about my feelings. Now that she's dead, my feelings for him are getting a lot worse. Meaning they're getting stronger. He was very upset by my sister's death: They have a son who's 8. I was sad too, but obviously conflicted about many things.

Would it be bad for me to tell this man how I feel about him now? If I do, I know my mother will freak. She was abandoned by my father right after I was born, so she has a lot of thoughts on the subject of love and marriage, as you can imagine. Also, I'm not too sure how the rest of our extended families will react.

I don't know what to do, which is why I'm writing you.

Randi

Judy's advice is, as ever, very sensible. As she says, "I'm in a really bad position here since you haven't given me a clue about your brother-in-law — namely, whether or not he's ever shown any indication that he's interested in you. Which is a fairly important factor." She also suggests that, given how short a time the sister's been dead, she should hold off - from confessing to anyone.

Here is what various dead people had to say:

Dorothy Parker: Darling, to hell with them. But remember: "Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away." Or not. Fools lap up folly like Manhattans.

Joseph Smith: Why art you not his plural wife in the first place?

Dr. Atkins: Diet and exercise are overrated. At the end of the day, we're all here and some of us haven't eaten a piece of fruit in thirty-two years.

Lizzie Borden: 'Wasn't a big suprise?' I know that game.

Jane Austen: Thoughts of love and marriage, madam, do not wisdom make, and what is more, the disapprobation of one's family can upon occasion bestow an untold degree of felicity - and distance not easily breached by a few miles of good road.

Anais Nin: The heart does not know law, know marriage...anxiety is love's only enemy!

Oscar Wilde: I have little to declare, madam, but your tedium. There are few things less engaging than a "widower," save perhaps an Ulster widower.

Flannery O'Connor: If he wanted you, he'd have you. Men seldom don't have what they want.

Jack Kerouac: Fuck You.

In Love With A Widower, Terminal Depression And Bucking Dependency [Obit]

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

• The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

We Only Date Ugly Men [TheSun]
Related: In Favor Of The Sensitive Man And Other Essays [Amazon]